J. ENVIRON. SYS., Vol.

4(1), Spring 1974

HOW TO AVOID ECOCIDE 1

WILLIAM H.BOYER 2
Director, Alternative Futures Program
University of Hawaii
Honolulu, Hawaii

ABSTRACT
We live in a world out of control, without integrated planning. Thermonuclear
war, global ecocide, and increased poverty is our collective destiny unless we
cooperatively guide the direction of history. This means our continuing education
must include learning to design the future, planning transition steps, and
undertaking social action so that theory and practice are tied together.

The education of people should now include a different kind of education and a
new form of creativity. Our common survival cannot long continue in a world
that plays Malthusian games of infinite expansion in a finite world,
pre-ecological games of exploitation rather than cooperation with ecosystems,
and pre-atomic war games instead of global peace keeping. The gap between the
rich and the poor nations is widening and there is no progress toward economic
justice within the United States, such a world requires not merely ad hoc crisis
management but imaginative integrated planning to transform obsolete
institutions and create new ones appropriate to this period of history. It requires
a new form of education which includes continuous involvement in the planning
of change.

1
Adapted from William Boyer, "Creativity Type II: Designing and Creating World
Futures," McGill Journal of Education, Spring 1973, by permission.
2
Professor Boyer is in the Department of Educational Foundations, where he teaches
courses on social and environmental futures and world order. His writings have appeared in
The Nation, Saturday Review, The Profressive and a variety of professional journals. His
latest book, Education For Annihilation, was published by Hogarth Press in 1972.

53

doi: 10.2190/9PQQ-L7QF-1J84-1FNR
http://baywood.com
54 / WILLIAM H. BOYER

Our education has been a model of our pre-ecological economic system,

stressing individual competition and self interest in ever greater acquisition and
consumption. But our central problems are social and global, and education
appropriate to the emerging age must switch from acquisitive individualism to
common life affirming goals. Unless education is a process which includes all age
levels, and unless it teaches people to participate in the design of appropriate
social change, there seems to be little chance of making this epochal transition.
If needed change occurs through totalitarian government, survival may be
bought at the price of justice. Or if people want to wait until a major crisis
galvanizes the survivors into action, they can plan to eliminate World War IV
instead of World War III. Anticipatory democracy seems a better choice.
So we now need both democracy and education, but each needs to undergo
transformation. "Democracy" need not be merely an election technique, it can
be a philosophy of group creativity. If groups can create social change, and if the
size of the groups and the scope of the process can be enlarged, we have the
prospect of an unprecedented but crucially needed form of creative behavior
where people join collectively to guide the course of history. The rest of this
paper will focus on this expanded conception of creative action in which 1) we
create the process by which we can create the future, and 2) we design preferred
futures and produce change toward their realization.

I
To apply design to the world's future suggests a task that may first appear
ludicrous, arrogant, and impossible. Any design task may appear too great at
first, whether it be designing furniture, a house, a landscape, a city, or a new
society. Yet isn't it really more startling to continue to assume that the future of
the human race should continue to be accidental? Though we recognize that the
human race is the dominant species to inhabit this planet and we are increasingly
aware that we have the potentiality for reshaping the course of history, we
ordinarily assume, however, that history must continue to be either unpredicta-
ble or subject to forces beyond human control. We teach ourselves to settle for
being either a spectator or an anticipator; but not a participator. We seldom see
that the role we have accepted in fact determines how the future is going to be
created.
There is an enormous range of devices used by people to convince themselves
of their impotence, and an enormous variety of compensatory mechanisms-
driving big cars, making loud noises with motorcycles, building huge buildings,
dropping big bombs—which provide the illusion of power. These compensatory
games distract from an analysis of basic social power, which creates the future
by directing the dynamics of change. Those who have special advantages under
the existing order have a stake in the perpetuation of the mythologies of
fatalism, pessimism, and impotence. The existing order is also sustained by
 HOW TO AVOID ECOCIDE / 55

ignorance of the way social and natural systems affect human life and by the
failure to examine alternative futures.
The dynamics of current change is based primarily on three factors;
quantitative expansion of numbers of people, increases in applied knowledge and
technology, and a hierarchical system of power within and between nations. This
mal-distribution of power produces a mal-distribution of wealth and income
which perpetuates the widening gap between the rich and the poor. The gap is
exacerbated both by differential birth levels and by exponentially increasing
consumption levels in the rich nations. Projections of current resources
consumption trends and their pollution by-products provides virtually certain
global ecocide within a relatively short length of time, twenty-five to fifty years.
Economic inequality lays the groundwork for counter violence. The inequality is
itself a form of violence, for the advanced industrial nations gorge themselves in
an orgy of overconsumption of the non-renewable resources that constitute a
common heritage of the entire human race. Meanwhile half the world lives in
abject poverty.
"Adjustment" and "adaption" have been interpreted by virtually all
institutions, including the schools, to mean that the individual should adapt to
trends. "Adaptation" has, in the double-speak of 1984, become a way of
reinforcing suicidal trends, which leads to Malthusian positive checks. Stability
eventually takes place through starvation, prédation, and disease. Either the
species plans or nature plans. There is no other alternative.
Species planning is radically multilateral. Schools usually emphasize
individual planning, if they teach any planning whatsoever. The parable cited by
Garrett Hardin in the well known article, "The Tragedy of the Commons,"
points out the basic fallacy of individual or unilateral planning, as a central
planning strategy. As the story goes, each of a small number of farmers grazed a
cow on the commons, providing subsistence for their families. Then one farmer
decided to maximize his advantage by getting another cow, and the others did
the same to compete. As this process continued, the commons was soon
overgrazed and all the cows died. This is a parable of the group in relation to
finite resources and it is basic to species planning on planet earth. The absence of
a structure for multilateral planning within nations and between nations
pre-determines a global tragedy of the common resources of the planet. The
alternative should be clear.
Unless people understand the dynamics of change and make systemic analysis
of the components of change, they do not have the "basics" for a better future
or even for species survival. Education must not fragment and atomize; it must
integrate. Disconnected fragments of information and separate intellectual skills
are merely grist for the present techno-structure. Our continuing education
should include macro-systems, macro-ecology, macro-economics, and macro-
politics. Unless people are helped to develop a world perspective focusing on the
structures that sustain life and will determine the quality of life in the future,
56 / WILLIAM H. BOYER

they are being distracted from the kind of education they need, processed by the
system to play out the tragedy of the cows on the commons.
Designing the future requires not only knowledge of baseline trends but also
models of preferred futures. It requires models of collective rather than
individual preferred futures, for reasons previously stated. Here we shift from
science to aspirational values. We become artists. As we imagine a preferred
future, stimulated by the imagination of others, we then must make
compromises between what we consider desirable and what is possible. If we can
also provide the rudiments for a strategy of transition—how to move from here
to there—we have the outline for a proposal for social change.
Another educational tradition is likely to be an obstacle at this point. The
design of futures might be a tolerable violation of sacred pedagogical traditions,
but the creation and the testing of the model is likely to be fundamental
sacrilege. Yet social action is the means of learning the attitudes and skills that
enable us to achieve social goals. The separation of theory from practice is
merely one way in which schools preserve the status quo. Under the traditions of
mind-body dualism students are taught to disconnect means from ends, thought
from emotions. Why should we want to design futures if we do not also increase
our power to help realize those goals?
All this is merely another way of talking about relevant citizenship, a topic
remarkably obscured by those who say schools should not be political. They
fail to distinguish between partisan politics and the "politics" in its generic
sense. It is precisely the involvement in community which is central to an
education that is humanistic and morally committed. Moral neutrality permits a
person to be merely a technician. The problems of common survival, human
equality, and environmental quality are not examples of partisan politics, nor are
they examples of neutrality. Unless education helps people use intellectual
processes as instruments to serve world interest goals they will continue to invert
means and ends, providing either distraction from basic common problems or
else teaching intellectual technique to serve an economy already out of control.

II
Continuing education should help people learn to analyze current planning
processes. Most governmental corporate planning is based on the assumption
that we should anticipate trends and then use technology to adjust to the trends.
Power companies are predicting a hundred per cent increase in energy
consumption within ten years. They urge appropriate political and economic
response, so that when they build the new power plants (at whatever price to
pollution and the world's resources) they can reinforce rising consumption levels
and in ten years show that they are prophets and saviors who have confirmed
 HOW TO AVOID ECOCIDE / 57

their prediction. Unless futurists understand the role of self-fulfilling prophecies

they are part futurist and part menace—primarily the latter.
Most of the ways in which futures are now being created may appear
Machiavellian to the spectator. The elite actors on the stage of history appear to
have a wide range of alternatives, choosing so often to retain a conspiracy of
power against the trapped audience. But Devil theories provide the easy
explanation, useful not merely to American presidents, but to other moral
determinists. It is far more likely that those decision makers who have the power
to create history are as much a victim of the mythologies that lock them into the
past as are the majorities who are affected by the decision. Myth and ignorance
provide the cohesion and stability for the present world order. The schools are a
major perpetuator of the selective ignorance which once was called the essential
wisdom. What passes for truth in one period can be the plan for suicide in the
next.
For example, nationalism has been the secular religion of the twentieth
century and is still on the upswing in newly developing countries. In the
pre-atomic, pre-ecological world of the early twentieth century, nationalism was
an integrating force. Whatever one's tribe, the nation melted him into a national,
either by democratic or totalitarian means. The significant point is that the
world is really one ecologically; it has a life support system that knows no
national boundaries. And if the world is to be one morally, it can have no
national boundaries on social justice.
The world has been and will continue to be one ecologically. It is not yet one
social-moral-political system operating under common law. Unless the political
order can plan with respect for the world's ecological life-support system, man
will have his nationalism at the price of extinction.
Now in the atomic age, national defense is no longer possible, yet nations
cling to an old system which is called national defense but is actually a mutual
annihilation system. "Defense" is created by semantics, and "anti-ballistic
missile systems" are developed which meet the semantic requirement though not
the performance requirement. Such symbolic madness occurs because people are
habituated to expect technological solutions rather than change of political
systems.
But there is nothing in human potentiality to prevent us from learning to
transform social institutions so that they serve people. People have been taught
to serve their institutions, a cruel irony of history, based on the common
sociological principle that means tend to become ends. Again we have a task for
education.
the principle that learning must begin where the child is experientially.
Therefore planning-éducation for first graders will probably take account only of
the classroom or the school ground environment. Children may re-design the
walls of their classroom. Additional growth in the student's experience should
58 / WILLIAM H. BOYER

permit him to be involved in regional and even state planning by the time he is in
high school. Adults should be directly involved in planning integrated futures
and appropriate transition steps. As the circle of experience moves outward it
will be seen that local planning cannot occur independent of global planning.
Plan New York without planning the U.S. and you have misplanned. Plan the
U.S. without coordinated world planning and you've fiddled while the world
prepares to burn.
But world planning is risky business. What about the danger of totalitarian
control? Wouldn't we avoid a global 1984 by pursuing the policy of "the best
government is the least government?"
This is a small planet with an expanding technology and an increasingly
vulnerable biosphere. Transnational organizations are developing rapidly, and
common means for managing a world economy and international violence
increasingly are seen to be necessary, with pilot models developing rapidly
through regional organizations such as the European Common Market. Since
world authority is evitable, the only question is whether it will occur before or
after global collapse such as World War III or global ecocide. Therefore the
question is not really whether world authority will develop but when and how,
serving what ends, by means of what system of control!
Change under the present "system" of non-world-order occurs primarily by
reinforcing random and accidental dynamics of change. This process is
exemplified by the role of the schools, which have their main effect on the
future by not teaching planning. If we do not teach people to be involved in
social planning, we reinforce the dynamics of existing systems by default. It is an
implicit rather than an explicit philosophy of education, which reinforces the
status quo.
History is made by what we do and what we fail to do. Our continuing
education should be evaluated on the basis of its response to the problems of the
world, and we need a theory for identifying the basic problems. If we continue
to believe, as some power companies do, that economic trends are inevitable
therefore good, schools will continue to provide intellectual skills to help
individuals add to the efficiency of existing economic systems and they will be
rewarded for doing so. If people are not taught to examine alternative futures
and to select and realize the most morally responsible future, the forces of
technology, market place economics, and hierarchical power will lock in existing
trends.
It is important to recognize that we cannot actually predict a particular
future. Scenarios of alternative futures, such as those in The Limits to Growth
are hypotheses. Hypotheses are "if so, then so" relationships. History is a set of
causal connections, but people can change and initiate new causes. The reason it
so often seems that we can predict the future is that we do not change the "if
so" conditions. When the conventional inputs occur, the expected results take
place. But we have the choice of retaining or altering inputs.
 HOW TO AVOID ECOCIDE / 59

Nothing is more influential in creating a false sense of inevitability than the

belief in determinism, which causes us either to reinforce directly the existing
dynamics of history or to do nothing and reinforce them by default. Alienation
and identity crisis are largely by-products of social systems that obstruct the
development of community. A pathological social structure produces alienation,
anomie, and de-politicization, which feeds back to perpetuate the social
structure and locks in the system. Education should be an instrument for
breaking the cycle, but its mode of analysis has been too psychological, too
pre-committed to a belief that the disease is in the patient. Counseling or
guidance has usually been a band-aid operation for individual symptoms,
adjusting the individual to the system, exacerbating the social pathology.
Futurist education should not be an escape from the present. Quite the
opposite, it should be a way of deciding what is really worth doing now by
deciding where the action should lead. It is presentism that consists of romantic
escape, for it ignores the reality of time. One's life should balance both being
and doing, but if one is doing something significant the two processes are
combined.
The reason for planning the future is not merely to raise the probability of
getting and experiencing what you really want, it also involves the obligation
that we have as humans. We are custodians of the future. It is not only immoral
but obscene for us to sell out our children and the yet unborn. In a period of
cataclysmic conflict between expansive trends and a finite earth, the absolute
minimum that any education should dedicate itself to is awareness of trends and
exploration of alternatives. No child should be the victim nor the perpetrator of
violence resulting from mis-planning or no-planning.
Accountability requires that one be aware of alternatives, and the failure of
education even to try to achieve such a goal becomes a moral crime. In the
backwash of our old legal system we have not yet made such a distinction, but if
the right to the preconditions of life is to be codified into law, denial of such
rights becomes criminal. As educators we have always honored the "right to
know" as an abstract principle. Now we have a basis for identifying what it is we
have a right to know.

Ill
There are two different kinds of future-creating forces, convergent and
probabilistic, which need to be taught. A time predictable event, such as
starvation based on population increases, is an example of the linear convergence
of two variables, in this case, food and people. The cataclysmic models of Limits
to Growth are of this type, using the interrelationship between four variables:
population, pollution, resource depletion, and capital investment.
Probabilistic change is more difficult for people to understand, for it is
statistical and not revealed by direct experience. The war system is probabilistic.
60 / WILLIAM H. BOYER

It does not provide us with a date at which an event such as an atomic World
War III will occur. Like rolling the roulette wheel, we don't know when 00 will
come up. There are remote odds that it might never come up, however we
maximize our chances of prediction by assuming that there are fixed odds built
into the system. We may not win if we follow such odds, but we raise the
chances of winning and reduce the chances of losing if we follow the odds. War
systems are similar. By placing nuclear armament within political units (nations)
capable of unilateral use of such weapons, we play nuclear roulette with the
world. We can alter odds either by juggling the equipment on the world roulette
wheel or by playing a new game. A new political game, removing anarchy and
unilateralism from the international political game, could dramatically alter the
probabilistic odds for war.
A probabilistic war system in the atomic age provides assured genocide, but
we don't know when. We can, however, estimate the safety-failure probabilities
and make a rough estimate of the chances of surviving each year. If we do
survive another year, those who fail to understand the nature of the system
begin to trust it saying, "We haven't had atomic war so far, therefore the system
must work." But the actual probabilities for having war may continue to be the
same. Like driving full speed through a city at night without lights, we had
better make one of two kinds of decisions: 1) that we are apparently immune to
accident, because we have not yet had one, or 2) that we are damn lucky to have
gotten this far and we'd better slow down and turn on the lights. Entire national
foreign policies are built on the confusion between probabilistic and convergent
systems. The American "defense" system is thought by many to be an "effective
deterrent" because during the period in which a weapons system called a
"deterrence" system was in operation World War HI did not occur. But having a
"deterrence" system provides an excuse for retaining the war system, and if you
don't have war while you have a war system it is in spite of the system rather
than because of it.

IV
A general planning formula might include both minimal and maximal goals.
For the next one hundred years the most likely threats to life are war, ecocide,
and absolute poverty. Minimal goals are first priority goals, necessary to preserve
life and provide at least the minimum conditions of social justice. But it is not
enough merely to minimize threats to the continuity of life. It is necessary but
not sufficient, so a decision must be to achieve minimal goals as urgently as
possible, setting a specific time goal. On a larger time scale, planned change
should be used to achieve maximal goals. Minimal and maximal goals might be as
follows:
Prevent cataclysmic war Create global cooperation and
world community.
 HOW TO AVOID ECOCIDE / 61

Prevent ecocide Manage the world economy

ecologically (steady state recycling).
Prevent absolute poverty Create equitable sharing of resources.
Clearly the goals on the right could not be reached in ten years. However, the
goals on the left might be reached in ten or twenty years. Therefore trade-offs
need to be made. In the design of preferred futures, are the values on the right
included as preferential values? If so these values optimize, while the values on
the left are sufficient merely for survival. Should we abandon optimum goals,
take half a loaf and settle for the enormously improved but less than optimum
world on the left side? Or should we use the goals on the right as preferred world
goals to be achieved by the mid-21st century, while the first stage in the
transition planning would target on the minimal goals on the left. Wouldn't this
order our priorities and permit practical time sequences during the transition
period?
The minimal values are all survival values. The values on the right include
survival and social justice values. The next objective would seem to be the
planning of environmental quality. This means there are three goals: 1) survival,
2) equality, and 3) quality. We may want to maximize all three, but we would
have to be ready for trade-offs when there was no other choice, and I would
maximize them in the order listed.
Notice I have not listed economic goals. Planning involves making
cost/benefit predictions, and economic costs and benefits cannot be omitted. A
central dilemma of the modern world, however, is the fact that "development"
has come to mean economic development. Quantitative GNP indicators have
been used as indicators of "progress" through the maximization of gross
economic units—whatever grotesque combination of goods and services they
might produce. In market-based economic systems, social values are secondary
to economic values, and ecological values come third, if at all.
In order to plan rationally there must be an estimation of economic, social,
and ecological costs and benefits. And these values must also be weighed in order
of priority. Since ecological values represent the life support system, it would
follow that they should be first, since they establish the parameters and
constraints under which an economic system must operate. But for what end?
Surely human community and social justice are the highest goals for which we
can plan. If so, social justice is more important than merely maximizing gross
national products by placing economic values at top priority.
What this means is a 180 degree reversal of the priority of economic values of
most Western developed nations:
Present Future
a. economic a. ecological
b. social b. social
c. ecological c. economic
62 / WILLIAM H. BOYER

When economics is subsumed under ecological planning, a steady state

economy results. All economies must be steady state (sometimes called
no-growth) eventually. The planning problem is to plan and create a
post-Malthusian world rather than submit to the positive checks of starvation,
pollution, resource depletion, disease, and war. "No growth" is not really a good
term, for an ecologically stablized recycling economy requires selectively
planned expansion, contraction, and stabilization. The service area of the
economy permits the greatest expansion while the goods economy, at least in
industrialized countries, requires selective stabilization and reduction. When a
steady state economy is planned on a world basis (and the sooner the better) it
should be done along with a redress in the mal-distribution of wealth and
income. Americans, Canadians, and other overconsuming nations are likely to
feel threatened at first, but a new education can help affect not only the process
of planning but also the transformation in personal values and life style. The
meaning of "standard of living" requires transformation from quantitative to
qualitative criteria.
The great hazard in reduced consumption education is that it often
encourages a life style and an ideology based on political anarchy. But it is
precisely the lawlessness and the anarchy of the present world that permits the
"tragedy of the commons." If there is to be common control of the commons,
including a global peace keeping system, unilateralism and individualism must
operate only within the constraints of social and ecological planning. It is clear
that atomistic individualism must give way to democratic world community if
participation and representation rather than hierarchy and coercion are to define
the world system. Not that a democratic political system can operate without
some coercion. If population expansion continues, the range of unilateral
freedom will be proportionally diminished under both a democratic or an
autocratic world system. But a participatory system offers the greatest assurance
that social justice will be realized and that the rules we must live by are
equitable.
In brief, if I were to sketch an outline of a futurist theory of education
applicable to beginning and continuing education at all levels, it would look as
follows:
A FUTURIST EDUCATIONAL MODEL

From (Current trends) Toward (Preferred future)

1. Survival
a. population expansion a. population control
b. a war system b. a peace-keeping system
c. pollution of the biosphere c. termination of pollution
d. waste of natural resources d. conservation-recycling
 HOW TO AVOID ECOCIDE / 63

2. Social Justice
a. economic disparity a. economic equality
b. inequality of human rights b. equal human rights
3. Experiential Quality
a. an ugly environment a. a beautiful environment
b. identity given b. identity created
This theory of education is based on the following assumptions:
1. Education cannot be neutral. Teachers should be honest and try to be
accurate.
2. Schools help create the future by intent or by default.
3. Schools usually reinforce obsolete institutions that have become
inadvertently pathological.
4. Schools should help to reconstruct the society.
5. The curriculum should be problem-centered.
6. The problems should be primarily problems of survival, social justice and
experiential quality.
7. Schools should emphasize participation in planning the future.
8. The focus should be global; planet earth and the human race.
9. The above broadly stated "preferred future" goals are supported by a
sufficiently large informed consensus to warrant their use as social-
educational goals.
10. The central task of research, inquiry, experimentation, and teaching
should be to identify the means of moving from current trends toward
more precisely defined preferred futures.
11. Knowledge and social action should be connected: students should
participate in social change.
12. Whenever possible, planning and social action should be based on group
processes.
The model provides a feed-back loop for reflection, planning, and social
action. It can be psychologically sound if it begins where the student is and helps
him participate in planning at his own level of experience, at first in the
classroom then in the school community, then in the local community, and
outward as rapidly as possible until he has a world perspective and can think of
himself and behave as a member of the human race.
There is little value in having continuing education become merely a
supermarket for buying obsolete knowledge and for accumulating course credits
to get jobs that produce a vested interest in the old order. Our education should
64 / WILLIAM H. BOYER

include designing plans for new work. The right to work in an ecologically
responsible, socially useful job at a liveable wage should be a central goal. Unless
we can transform our own economic system so that our work is a contribution
to human needs rather than a predatory and exploitative activity, our theoretical
planning will be merely an academic exercise.
On the one hand we are victims of our own experience, and so history
establishes the mold of the future. Yet we are now in a period of history where
we have learned enough to begin inventing the future. Each stage prepares us to
apply even more creativity to historical change, thus increasing our creativity
and generating new power that can provide an enormous increase to human
freedom. No longer must man be a victim of the past, acting out habits over
which he has no control. This new power to create new futures arrives at a
fortunate time, for most of the old habits are not merely obsolete but suicidal.
Clearly the mandate to education is to help facilitate this planning process, not
merely for a better future, but in order to help assure that there be a future at
all.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Boyer, William, "Education for Survival," Phi Delta Kappan, Jan. 1971; also,
Education for Annihilation, Hogarth-Hawaii, 1972.
Falk, Richard, This Endangered Planet, Random House, New York, 1971.
Hardin, Garrett, "The Tragedy of the Commons," Science, Vol. 162, 13,
December 1968.
Marsh, Leonard, Education in Action: Proposal for a Social Planetarium,
Versatile Publishers Co., B.C., Canada.
Meadows, Donella, et al., The Limits to Growth, Universe Books, New York,
1972.